GCSE target grades in year 7?

[tripp22]

I know GCSE target grades in year 7 are based on KS2 sats results but does anyone know how these are calculated? Or is it just based on scaled scores, for example a scaled score of 100 = gcse grade 4, 120 = gcse grade 9 etc? If so, does anyone where I can find what each scaled score is equivalent to? I can find some online but all schools seem to be different?

Lots of schools use FFT (Fischer Family Trust) data. I think they look at how similar students at KS2 performed when they got to GCSE. Fine for things like Maths or English but utter crap in my subject.

My DCs school uses FFT as above. My younger DC is good at maths and has a reasonable target - he has the same target in art, French and Product design, which is slightly over optimistic!

As above - likely to be FFT unless your child sat CATs which also generates target grades. A student's FFT target takes into account things like SEN and deprivation (Pupil Premium and Free School Meals) and says "students like this who get x score in KS2 tend to get y grade at KS4".

A school might use FFT 50 (average) or FFT 20 (stretch goal).

We don't publish our student's FFT target grades at all because
a) We have a mobile population (university city) so up to 10% of students in Year 11 didn't take KS2 SATS
b) Some students are very stressed out by their targets (low or high), we prefer to give them teacher generated targets
c) They are fairly innacurate for those students who had low English skills at KS2 due to being EAL
d) They are innacurate if a school is really pushy in Year 6 and only focuses on SATS
e) As above, they work better for some subjects than for others

We only use them internally to gauge
a) That we are on vaguely the right track with the student
b) What our government progress figures will say - are we doing everything we can to pull them up/have students doing the best they can

I didn't really answer your question did I?
No, there is no published data on what each scaled score is equivalent to as an FFT target, partially because it uses contextual data as above so there's no clear answer.
If 40% of students are below an average scaled score of 100 at KS2, then yes, I would guess 100 = grade 4 at GCSE. (I don't have those stats here right now.)

Whole concept is pretty ridiculous

Which is quite a useful tool for predicting how a cohorrt of students ought to do, but pretty much a waste of time if you are trying to guess what any individual will do, and anyone using such data to predict how individuals should do is well....